When I studied Latin in high school, I was astounded by the number of verbs that language has that describe various ways of killing someone. For example, there were single verbs for “to kill by stabbing in the back” and “to kill by chopping into pieces.” That may explain a few things about Roman culture.

Too many people misuse “decimate” to indicate some kind of massacre. This is usually because it sounds cooler than “destroy” or “annihilate.”

Decimation (decimatio) was a form of military discipline used to punish cowardly soldiers. It means “remove a tenth.” The cowardly unit was divided into ten parts. Each unit drew a lot. The losing part was executed by the other nine parts. Killing that one tenth (decem) was an example to everyone else, and to other units in that cohort, legion, or army.

One interesting note (well, interesting to me) is that no one was spared. The ten parts were made up of all ranks of the unit, and also included those who did not demonstrate the behavior.

You could have the bravest man in the legion executed, for example, simply because he was in a cohort that displayed cowardice, and he had the bad luck to be in the tenth selected to die.

Ah, the ol’ venomous vs poisonous routine. Stems from when snakes used to be called poisonous until some smart aleck realized that wasn’t completely accurate. The venom can be poisonous by injection – which is what happens when the snake bites you. But, if you were to drink the venom AND you had NO wounds in your intestinal tract to pass intact venom into the bloodstream, you wouldn’t die. Your stomach would just break down the venom & no harm done. So now we have venomous snakes, not poisonous ones. Don’t think the snakes noticed one bit. And sounds like the Loris’s venom is actually a poison, because it’s my understanding that venom kills *only* by injection. Which would make the Loris poisonous, like Poison Dart Frogs. But, I could be wrong…